Donald J. Trump is America's first pornographic president.
Sure, JFK and Bill Clinton lived lives of debauchery in and out of the White House. But Kennedy's sex life was a pastiche of WASP glamour, endless boring affairs of the necking-after-lawn-tennis variety. Bubba, meanwhile, was a genuine Arkansas country boy in the best and worst sense. Tearing up the green at some backwater country club with his brother Roger and a few ladies they picked up at the Razorbacks game is, or at least used to be, his highest aspiration. The 35th and 40th presidents of the United States were mere perverts. Trump is something different.
It's not only the case that he is our first president credibly accused of having had affairs with multiple porn stars. It's that his mind, personality, and appearance are fundamentally pornographic. The tawdry aesthetic of pornography is what lies behind his orange skin, his bleached blond hair, his protruding stomach, even his tiny white tennis shorts. Trump Tower, with its faux marble and imitation gilt and lifeless plastic palms, is a porno location. So is Mar-a-Lago, where overweight boomer tycoons pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to engage in a Ron Jeremy parody of leisure. So, too, in Trump's mind, is the White House.
Trump is president in the same sense that Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights is a secret agent. He goes through the motions of being the commander in chief, making vague references to "deals," having poorly stage-managed "meetings" with people whose costumes indicate that they could be actual members of Congress, having his picture taken with this or that supposed foreign leader. But all this is a put-on, a painfully necessary antecedent to the titillating action craved by his most enthusiastic followers, most of whom are white men of middle age and older: the cable news equivalent of the nudie scenes.
The truth about Trump and the cheap nature of his political appeal is that it is onanistic. He owns the libs hard onscreen and his fans get off. Two minutes later their euphoria has subsided and they are back to railing against entitled snowflake millennials who live with their parents while plotting with Antifa to sell American jobs to ISIS jihadists in exchange for organic avocado toast squares.
As with pornography, the experience for Trump fanboys can be addictive. It also has a kind of spiraling effect. Literature suggests that the man who starts off Googling "ample bosom" eventually moves on to foot fetishism and then to Japanese schoolgirls engaged in illicit congress with elderly men dressed as various minor characters from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It's the same thing with those who enjoy Trump's endless televisual antics. It begins innocently, laughing along with him as he mocks John McCain, a natural enough pastime but one that, like any good thing, becomes a bad one if indulged to excess. Two years later it has metamorphosed into getting your jollies from four-week marathon sessions of the president mocking Haitian refugees and composing encomiums to resigned domestic abusers.
Where will it end? Posting on Facebook that the media is lying about Trump's retweet of an article from PatriotBulletin.net claiming that Mueller spent a hot and heavy evening with Crooked Hillary that was taped by weirdo Lil Bob Corker and covered up by the murderers at Morning Joe in an attempt to distract the American people from the beauty of the latest Infrastructure Week? The mind reels.
What these addicts need to understand is that this activity is not healthy for them, physically or spiritually. The desire to offend the sensibilities of the higher liberalism — the right-thinking consensus that flows seamlessly from The New York Times to Davos to the advertising departments of the world's wealthiest corporations to the latest DNC talking points — and its adherents is a wholesome one. It's a natural appetite that, when properly channeled, can be ordered to the common good. It can also be abused. There are more wholesome ways of making it clear that you did not think that the repeal of net neutrality was not the worst atrocity in the history of American governance or that #theOscars are the wokest thing since Gandhi.
Give your frazzled eyeballs and fingers a break, guys.
